Making the Turn

Yes, the PGA Tour officially opens Thursday ... as in tomorrow ... with the Frys.com Open in California, the first tournament on the Tour's new split-year "wraparound" schedule.

Now, instead of the tour beginning in early January, it will begin with seven tournaments in October and November, will take a five-week break and will resume during the week of New Year's with the traditional Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Hawaii.

The reasons for the format change are many and varied, but most of the basic elements will still be in place. The Masters will still be the first full week in April and will usher in spring for most of the country, the U.S. Open is still in June and the Open Championships is in July.

The major difference is that the new format results in an earlier end to the schedule, with the regular season wrapping up in mid-August and the FedEx Cup Playoffs wrapping up with the Tour Championship in mid-September. For those of us in the South, that means that several of the key events at the end of the season won't have as much overlap with football season - a good thing for golf in general, and even better for those of us living in football country.

There will be 45 PGA Tour events this year, with all of them offering FedEx points ... meaning that the race for the FedEx trophy starts tomorrow. The fall events are also important in that they now include Masters invitations to the winners, something that wasn't in pace in the old fall schedule that was more aimed at players retaining their Tour membership than building up points and results for the year.

Local golf fans' opportunities to see the pros won't change. On the PGA Tour, the Zurich Classic of New Orleans is April 21-27 at TPC Louisiana, and the Shell Houston Open is March 31-April 6 at Redstone in Humble, Texas.

The schedule for the Web.com Tour hasn't officially been released, but the Chitimacha Louisiana Open returns to its late-March slot. The $550,000 local event is set March 24-30 at Le Triomphe, and will likely still be the first U.S. stop on that Tour.

That event will have a slight change in its scheduling partner, though. The Louisiana Open has been opposite the limited-field Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill for several years, but this year will be opposite the PGA Tour's Valero Texas Open in San Antonio, a full-field event. That means the Open may not have the number of PGA Tour-card holders that couldn't get into the Bay Hill field taking part.

However, the increase in talent on the Web.com Tour, set up by the new qualifying format that went into effect with the new schedule, will all but insure the strongest top-to-bottom field in Open history for next March.

Until then, it'll be fun to keep tabs on players who recently played in the Open who are now PGA Tour members though this year's qualification system. Among them are former LSU standouts Andrew Loupe and John Peterson, who are both in the Frys.com field, and Louisiana native Heath Slocum, returning to the PGA Tour after a multi-year battle to get his Tour card back.

All three earned their way to the Tour through the just-completed Web.com Tour finals series, with Peterson finishing as the top money winner in the four-tournament series and guaranteeing himself a playing spot in every regular-season PGA Tour event.